Soren Nordal Enevoldsen's Brilliant Double-Duty Drainage Ditch

For a designer to bring their own personal passion into a public works project can be indulgent, or it can be fantastic. This example is the latter. Danish architect Soren Nordal Enevoldsen, who's been designing skateparks and skate shop interiors since at least the early 2000s, was tasked by the Danish municipality of Roskilde to revitalize a massive and abandoned concrete production area called Musicon. The site is exposed to a "huge amount of rainwater from the adjacent city areas," and a drainage facility was required as part of the project.

Put two and two together yet? Enevoldsen and his firm, Nordarch, designed a massive concrete area that collects and transports water into a canal. But the 24,000-square-foot drainage facility is also peppered with undulating shapes, walls curving up to near-vertical and grindable edges, meaning the resultant Rabalder Parken design doubles as a big-ass skatepark.

"The Canal itself empties rather quickly when the rain stops, and the particular water reservoir where the skatepark is placed, will only be filled approximately once every 10 years," Enevoldsen told Wired. "That means the rain will almost never have an impact on the skatepark use."

A week and a half ago, we saw some striking images of the Burj Khalifa, reportedly captured with "the best digital still image equipment money can buy." In which case Google's Trekker might be an example of superlative photography equipment that is beyond a mere bankroll.Indeed, the Google Maps team...

My ID classmate kept getting burgled. His second-storey East Village apartment was broken into multiple times, and in frustration he signed a year lease on apartment 6B of a six-flight walk-up. He reasoned that no thief would be willing to haul a television down six flights of stairs. But within...

Photo by Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesIn New York City there are plenty of places to get drunk, starting with my kitchen. But most crave a more glamorous experience, and in a city of millions, glamor is often equated with exclusivity and secrecy. Faux speakeasys have become as...

While Amazon had already received City Hall approval to build a new HQ in Seattle, apparently they've had a change of heart with the design, perhaps inspired by the forthcoming Facebook West and the Apple Spaceship. The skyscraper part of Amazon's multi-building plan remains the same, but they're looking to...